edilection for the study of the ancient
geometry evinced by various members of this Lancashire School, exercised
considerable influence upon the minds of such distinguished proficients as
Cunliffe, Campbell, Lowry, Whitley, and Swale.

Hence it would seem that _many_, and by no means improbable, reasons may be
assigned for "the very remarkable circumstance of the geometrical analysis
of the ancients having been cultivated with eminent success in the northern
counties of England, and particularly in Lancashire." Mr. Harvey, at the
York meeting of the British Association in 1831, eloquently announced "that
when Playfair, in one of his admirable papers in the _Edinburgh Review_,
expressed a fear that the increasing taste for analytical science would at
length drive the {58} ancient geometry from its favoured retreat in the
British Isles; the Professor seemed not to be aware that there existed a
devoted band of men in the north, resolutely bound to the pure and ancient
forms of geometry, who in the midst of the tumult of steam engines,
cultivated it with unyielding ardour, preserving the sacred fire under
circumstances which would seem from their nature most calculated to
extinguish it." Mr. Harvey, however, admitted his inability clearly to
trace the "true cause of this remarkable phenomenon," but at the same time
suggested that "a taste for pure geometry, something like that for
entomology among the weavers of Spitalfields, may have been transmitted
from father to son; but who was the distinguished individual _first_ to
create it, in the peculiar race of men here adverted to, seems not to be
known." However, as "the two great restorers of ancient geometry, Matthew
Stewart and Robert Simson, it may be observed, lived in Scotland," he asks
the important questions:--"Did their proximity encourage the growth of this
spirit? Or were their writings cultivated by some teacher of a village
school, who communicated by a method, which genius of a transcendental
order knows so well how to employ, a taste for these sublime inquiries, so
that at length they gradually worked their way to the anvil and the loom?"

An attentive consideration of these questions in all their bearings has
produced in the mind of the writer a full conviction that we must look to
other sources for the revival of the study of the ancient geometry than
either the writings of Stewart or Simson. It has been well observed by the
most eminent geometer of our own tim